Anyone who has played most massively-multiplayer online games (more commonly known as an MMO) will know that not all players are created equal. From the very first days of the first MMOs like Everquest to today with juggernauts like World of Warcraft, people have said that one class, one profession, one item is more overpowered (or OP) than the other.

Some people view this aspect of gameplay as a negative and seek to negate (“nerf”) the advantage. Others see it as a way to get ahead. This Neverwinter Review looks at some of the ways you can unfairly get ahead of the competition in Neverwinter Online.

For success in Neverwinter Online you should use astral diamonds for sure. They are very useful when it comes to boosting your weapons to make sure your DPS is of the charts. Unfortunately when do dungeons you will not get the most diamonds, you should do skirmishes and daily quests. The smartest thing to get these gems is to go to the auction house and buy low.

If you are familiar with MMOs, you likely know how to manipulate auction houses. If not, here are a few tips:

Look for the comparative price per unit, rather than as a lump sum

Buy whenever the unit price is lowest, regardless of the overall cost

Nine times out of ten, individual diamonds are the most overpriced

Don’t be afraid to sell your diamonds!

Selling one or two for a high value gives you more resources to buy a bundle of half a dozen. You can get up to the maximum 24,000 rough diamonds provided you understand the ebb and flow of the marketplace. Remember that there is only a limit on the number of rough gems you can get each day, not the finished gems.

Tips for Foundry Missions

The best way to get experience is when you complete missions in the daily foundry. Not all dungeons are eligible, just like the mission: “I Am Slayer”, always check first that you pick a foundry mission to receive the rewards. It would also be a good idea to avoid a certain foundry mission called: “Kidnapping in Blacklake”, the reason for this is if you don’t manage to make the correct jumps your experience will reset and all your effort will have been for nothing.

Ideally, you will be able to find one of the non-stop spawning foundry missions that forced the hands of the developers to put in a patch to stop them. A few are out there: look for those that have a lower time limit because they funnel XP so fast you need not stay long.

Azure Enchantments for XP

You need to make sure to get the advantages of the azure enchantment system and it makes no difference what class you play with. A lot of individuals have no idea that this type of enchantment is very valuable to get experience, because that is exactly what it does; boosting experience and not base stats. Especially when you do quests that require a lot of slashing mobs, the rewards in XP are much greater than the normal “speed”. The smart thing to do is to combine these enchantments with other enchantments that boost the drops of better items. This way as you play and fight, you will also be able to get more astral diamonds along with maximum XP.

The State Of MMOs

There is so much money in massively-multiplayer online gaming these days that nearly every company in the industry is hopping on board in order to get a slice of the pie. Blizzard Entertainment’s flagship World of Warcraft makes more money in a year than its other games have in their lifetime; Electronic Arts put nearly half a billion dollars into the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic; Bethesda Studios announced they would create The Elder Scrolls Online with the expectation that millions would play it.

Though many companies start off with great ambitions, most MMO games these days turn free to play quickly in the hope to become the best free MMO, since it is not possible to create a profitable model for most games. In fact, only two titles — WoW and EVE Online — remain profitable and not free to play (“F2P”).

Enter Neverwinter

With the launch of Neverwinter Online, Bioware hopes to capitalize on the success of prior game installments of Neverwinter Nights. Their means of ensuring profitability, however, came not from demanding a charge for the game (since it costs no money to play the game) but rather the items within the game. This strategy has proven to be a popular and profitable model for the battle arena games like DOTA 2, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth: instead of charging customers money for the game, instead charge customers money to upgrade their gameplay.

The Neverwinter MMO is currently listed in “beta” and will be likely to remain in beta for the foreseeable future, since their profit model does not necessitate a release of a finished game — just like Valve’s DOTA 2 is still in beta after more than two years since its release.

What Makes A Game Tick

What is the attraction of the Neverwinter MMO? Like it is readable in the forums, some competitors have figured out, it is not enough to present the lore of a past game; Guild Wars 2 attempted to do so but still needed to maintain a F2P model to be profitable. Nor is it a bunch of flashy graphics, since other MMOs like Tera Online have high-quality palettes but not enough people to fill their servers.

NPC action in the tavern

Neverwinter went for a balance of aesthetics and gameplay: the game can easily run on most modern PCs and the world is certainly beautiful to look at, while the music swells appropriately when you enter a capital city. The combat system is faster than many other games, requiring a quick transition between spells, counter-moves, and auto attacking. The player-verses-player combat (PVP) is not clunky but only has two maps for head-to-head combat.

What separates Neverwinter Online from its competitors, however, and the main focus of this Neverwinter Review, is that it is OP in particular ways that some would demand to be nerfed. Since the gameplay model is F2P, the game profits from transactions, in which you spend real-life money (rather than in-game currencies like gold) on items.

Some of these items, such as $10 Zen, give you the ability to upgrade skills. Others, like some of the strongest enchantments available to weapons (notably the Greather Thunderhead enchantment) requires a staggering $160 and can be used to great effect in PVP. The end result is several unfair advantages — more of which you will learn about on this site.